Bill Cunningham/The New York Times
Six months ago, the catwalks of New York, Paris and Milan presaged a return to an era that some of us remember with little fondness and many are too young to remember at all. Design houses as disparate as Gucci, Givenchy, Ungaro, Gianfranco Ferré, Gareth Pugh, Proenza Schouler and Marc Jacobs, for his own label and for Louis Vuitton, started swiping references (paying homage would be a more polite way to put it) to that benighted era with displays of big shoulders, saturated neon colors, wedge hairdos, pouf skirts, shredded fishnets, oversize jackets and metal mesh.
Now that the stuff is rolling into stores, consumers are in for a flashback — at least they are if they have any firsthand recollection of Adam Ant or Culture Club or “Working Girl” or, for that matter, the Reagan White House.
“Anyone who has been in the fashion business for longer than five years,” Amy M. Spindler, the late Times fashion critic, once wrote, “might be feeling like a drowning man whose life is flashing before his eyes.” Ms. Spindler was referring to th
e disturbingly rapid-fire way fashion had of recycling the recent past.
That was in long-ago 1996, when fashion archaeology was still necessarily conducted in musty used-clothes stores, in Goodwill bins and in caves like the one the vintage-magazine dealer Michael Gallagher ran in the East Village and where designers like Marc Jacobs unearthed some of their better ideas from the back pages of Vogue.
Now, as we all know, the pace of appropriation has accelerated to the point where a drowning man would barely have time to blink before going under.
“People embrace things so quickly,” said Laura Wills, who, as proprietor of the vintage clothing store Screaming Mimi’s, has spent three decades anticipating which style memory will be next up on the cultural screen. “They move on so fast that they constantly need new references. Around the store we laugh and say, ‘Didn’t we already do the ’80s? Didn’t we have that neon moment five years ago?’ “
The truth is, we have. We had the return of “Flashdance,” that seminal artifact of schlock filmmaking and stretch leggings, as long ago as the mid-’90s, when the designers Roger Padilha and Jennifer Groves showed a fashion collection that paid loving homage to Jennifer Beals’s leg warmers, suede fringe and shoulder-slouched shirts. We had the lace-gloves-and-crucifix Madonna of “Like a Virgin” in all kinds of iterations and from designers with as little in common as Betsey Johnson and Jean Paul Gaultier. We had the dropped-crotch trousers inevitably associated with MC Hammer, interpreted early on by Rick Owens and later by that designer’s many imitators and now so ubiquitous that a must-to-avoid item is a must-have.
“A lot of those trends have been creeping in for a while, the leggings and the big shoulders and the neon,” said Chioma Nnadi, the style editor of Fader magazine. “It’s about escapism for people.” And not incidentally about the humor to be derived in tough times from flouting the strictures of safe, approved taste. “A certain amount of what is being revived is quite cheesy,” Ms. Nnadi added. “But then sometimes bad taste allows more room for creativity and play.”
Transforming dropped-crotch diaper pants into “something fabulous,” as she said, can be seen as a positive gesture, and one with a lineage traceable to an even earlier and less conformist era, the one that produced “Notes on ‘Camp.’ ”
In a way, the 
current ’80s revival is camp for people who have never heard of Susan Sontag, and the latest fashion cycle an opportunity for a new crop of designers to find in that dubious decade a mother lode of irony ready to be mined. “Dallas,” Cabbage Patch Kids, “The Cosby Show” and Princess Diana (whose style Germaine Greer likened last year to that of a TV anchorwoman, but with dreadful and “inevitable” hats) all made their debut in the ’80s. So, in an indelible pop-cultural sense, did Brooke Shields, in her “nothing comes between me and my Calvins” phase.
Michael Jackson, Ms. Shields’s onetime soul mate, was doubtless the most irresistible pop-cultural phenomenon to emerge from the ’80s, and so it is logical that the singer’s “Thriller” wardrobe would be sampled by fashion’s early adopters even before his death in June.
“Everyone’s been feeling ‘Thriller’ for a while now,” Ms. Wills said of Screaming Mimi’s. “We’ve already seen the studded leather jacket in fashion.” And come fall, she added, “that’s all anybody’s going to be looking for.”
For those who happened to have been around at the time (in New York, at least), the latest rendering of the ’80s may not be altogether recognizable as such. Where, one might ask, is the ’80s of neo-Beat-style scenesters like the filmmaker Eric Mitchell or of musicians like Arto Lindsay and Lydia Lunch? Where is the plaid-shirted prole-chic of activists from groups like Act Up and Queer Nation? Where are the miniskirts and tattered fishnets of the gorilla-masked feminist radicals who called themselves the Guerrilla Girls?
Blinding racks of sequins and glitter being offered up by mass retailers like Topshop give little indication that the ’80s produced anything more stylistically radical than Joan Collins’s shoulders or more musically rebellious than the Cars. As the designer Keanan Duffty points out in a new book, “Rebel Rebel: Anti-Style,” the ’80s was also the decade when the performance artist Leigh Bowery first made his mark wearing outrageous costumes sometimes held in place with safety pins that pierced his cheeks; when Vivienne Westwood presented the pirates collection that has spawned a million Blackbeard imitations; and when Boy George first hove into view on the pop-culture horizon, with his gender provocations and Kewpie-doll lips.
“People don’t remember how extreme” people like Boy George and Leigh Bowery were, Mr. Duffty said. (Well, some people do: Were he still alive, Leigh Bowery could be living off the stylistic royalties owed him by John Galliano and Alexander McQueen.)
“People were a lot more controversial and out there” in the ’80s, Mr. Duffty said. “I remember going into the Foundry,” he said, referring to a legendary London shop where Boy George was a clerk, “and George was wearing a Star of David T-shirt, Rasta-like dreadlocks, a Hasidic hat, heavy makeup and a skirt.”
What is missing from the current revival is “that striving for outsider status, that sense of ‘I don’t care,’ ” Mr. Duffty said. Yet in a sense the most recognizably nostalgic aspect of another ’80s revival is the longing it betrays for a time when it was not only possible but desirable to flout convention and to be — as Kim Hastreiter, the editor of Paper magazine, suggested — the German aristocrat Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis dancing on the bar at the Mudd Club in a couture pouf dress from Christian Lacroix.
“When they reference the ’80s, designers can reference all that exuberance, that archness,” the designer Rick Owens said last week by phone from the French seaside town where Proust spent his summers. The ’80s were one of the last times, maybe the last, Mr. Owens said, when creative people “felt free to be flamboyant,” to indulge in excess.
Flamboyance and libertinism are harder to pull off when close to 10 percent of the population is unemployed. It’s risky to be seen rushing headlong into all tomorrow’s parties when there’s no money left in the bank.
Still, as Mr. Owens suggested, tough times may yet turn out to have been good for creativity.
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